David Gill, a Scotsman, trained as a watchmaker and worked in that profession. Timekeeping led to astronomy, and he designed, equipped, and operated a private observatory at Dun Echt near Aberdeen for James Lindsay, the Earl of Crawford. In 1877 Gill and his wife travelled to Ascencion Island to measure the solar parallax by observing Mars. After he proved the worth of the heliometer, a telescope with a divided objective, for measuring the distance to the sun, he was appointed Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, a position he held from 1879 to 1906. He greatly improved the observatory, designing and securing new instruments of unprecedented precision. He redetermined the distance to the sun to such precision that his value was used for almanacs until 1968. He photographed the southern sky and helped initiate the international Carte du Ciel project to chart the entire sky. Gill and Jacobus C. Kapteyn, who measured Gill's photographs in the Netherlands, initiated the separation of observation from reduction. Gill also made geodetic surveys of South Africa. In fact he carried out all of the observations to measure the distances to stars in terms of the standard meter.